The TRUTH behind unlocking the AMD Radeon HD 6950

[billcat479]

Whoa? Maybe you misunderstood the original findings. They are dead on accurate.

What is it exactly you don't agree with?

There is a good chance I missed something. A lot of the time with cpu's and most likely with GPU's they find they don't test out well enough to get a specific rating. So they are clocked down, if they have a defective part it's disconnected and made into a lesser performing chip. This may be the case of where a lot of the 6950's came from and while possible to get them working up to the 6970's it may be taking a chance that it won't clock up to heights of the faster one.
Unless they have a market need and just de-tune the 6970's but it can be a crap shoot if you get one or the other.
The memory speeds is the part that is set in stone so to say. Do they use the same rated memory chips? If not this would block them from ever being as fast as their faster rated mem. chips on the faster boards.
I've heard of enough problems with trying to unlock these and then getting them working perfect and this is the first time I've ever heard of them being faster. Is this faster with the same clock for clock speed settings? It kind of sounded this way. Have to go back and check it out as it's been a while and that would be impossible if they were identical cards. They have the same layout and timings so it could not be faster all things being equal. Unless there was a weird defect causing this.
So I do question the whole thing. Anything is possible but very rare to see this result. I hope it doesn't talk lots of others into taking this course. Most only post success with this trick because who likes to say they tried it and ruined a expensive card. Not many but with the reviews on them it sure seems like it's not a given that it will work like you expect and it's a risky operation. If you do get a poor processed chip it can act erratic or have heat issues or just die and you'll never really know till it hits it's limits on damaged area's they turned off to make it a useable slower video card.
Oh well, this is why I question it, hope I gave a good list of reasons. It may be a one in a million card that has something odd that makes it faster. Anything is possible in this universe.

 

[eidairaman1]

as its said AMD takes the ones that cant reach the specs n dumbs em down, but all companies do this, but on certain occaisions they do have ones that are perfectly fine just lock em down so they can make up for stock numbers, so getting a Lower Model CPU/GPU is a hit n miss if they can reach certain core/shader/clock levels

 

[Outback Bronze]

Well nobodys said this but i am very happy with my 6950s flashed 6970s. I bought them when they first came out, not even knowing they could be flashed. Wizzard was the man that told me it was possible and boy was he right. Ive been runing them 4 about a year now(1 gigabyte,1 sapphire) and its all been good(so far). Im currently running them @1.125 volts on the default bios of 880mhz/1375mhz. I hope people have had the same joy as me.

P.s. Ive seen my memory on the cards go to as close as 3000mb.

 

[CentaurAOA]

My apologies